


like dignity is equal to desperation and self-effacement

by blackwood (transjon)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gore, Medical Experimentation, Other, Surgery, Trans Male Character, Vaginal Fisting, horrible bedside manner on the part of the students, references to self harm, wound fingering, woundfucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:28:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transjon/pseuds/blackwood
Summary: Eye avatars, he thinks, with eyes inside of them. Nothing but eyes. Just eyes and the impressions of what used to be organs. Muscle and sinew with little eyes mapping out the surfaces of them. Bones turning semi-solid with the eyeballs taking up more and more space from them. Eyes, all seeing, seeing nothing, kept prisoners within the secret rooms of the cavities of his body.
Relationships: the anatomy students/jonathan sims
Comments: 10
Kudos: 54





	like dignity is equal to desperation and self-effacement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spiraldistortion (bisexualthorin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualthorin/gifts).



> title from sweet dreams sweet cheeks by los campesinos!
> 
> this is NOTHING like what i usually write im SO sorry if it seems like mildly aimless i dont really know what people look for in this type of fic so uhh i hope this works,? thank u CATTHEW for giving me the Challenge and Prompt of pushing my weird creative boundaries i had a good time!!!!
> 
> this is set in the vague beginning bits of s4, somewhere before the coffin! i know he doesnt really realize that he heals fine before hes trying to find an anchor (iirc?) in his fingers (....) and fails to sever them and then almost immediately realizes his ribs dont in fact respawn (although i mean, jared isnt really just performing ordinary surgery) buttttttttt
> 
> for the bit where his genitals are interacted with (and he gets fisted lol) the words used 2 refer to them are cunt & cock

The table is cold. 

The scalpels are as well, and so are the dozens of disembodied hands gliding over his skin. It’s all cold. The fear squeezing its icy fist around his heart is cold, too. 

Jon guesses it makes sense. It is a morgue they’re in, after all. Fitting, in a way. Beauty in the symmetry. Beauty in the poetry of it all. 

“Just lie still,” says the student nearest to his head. A hand that he thinks might belong to that particular one smooths down a few locks of his hair. Jon squeezes his eyes shut tightly, heart lurching in his chest, but it doesn’t hurt him, just takes its hand away. 

“Right,” Jon says. “My apologies. Are you not going to give me – aren’t you going to give me anesthesia?” 

It’s a curiosity more than it’s a genuine question. Something he just wants to know.

He tilts his head back and opens his eyes slowly to look at the face of the student. The look on its face doesn’t change, all careful neutrality. “Why would we?”

“Usually,” Jon winces as the blade of a scalpel tracing a line across his hips catches at his skin and cuts open a shallow, horizontal wound, “usually that’s what surgeons do, so the person they’re operating on doesn’t feel it.”

“You’re not a person, Archivist.”

Jon grits his teeth. It’s not like he actually wants to be under for this. Defeats the purpose. “Close enough.”

“Either you are, or you’re not,” another student points out. Two hands on Jon’s thighs move, up, then down again. “It’s easy with people. Everything is so binary.”

“How so?” 

“Either you’re alive, or you’re not. Either you’re human or you’re not.”

Jon bites his tongue so he doesn’t disagree out loud. The six months of mostly death he’s just gotten out of would disagree. It seems like the line between person and monster is vague, at best. Seems like the students still have a lot to learn. 

“How is this helping you learn, then?” he asks. The wrist restraints feel tighter than they were just a second ago. Fingers wrap around his ankles, and then there’s straps there as well. He wonders if there’ll be more. He wonders if he’ll notice them.

“It isn’t,” says one of them. It’s somewhere on his right, somewhere between the one by his shoulder and the one by his knee. 

“It only makes sense if you’re getting something out of it,” he points out, although he wonders about that, too. Wouldn’t it be helpful, to know the other? How to differentiate between human and not human? Human and him?

A large cotton wool ball reeking strongly of rubbing alcohol lands on his thigh. The liquid soaks the skin and leaves it tacky and damp. “Don’t humans ever do things just for fun?”

“Yes,” Jon admits. This, in a way, is him doing something for fun. 

(Not human, says the voice in his head. Sort of human, he replies back stubbornly. Human enough.)

“So,” says the student behind his head, “isn’t that enough?”

“Alright,” he mumbles. “Get to work, then, doctor –”

“Doe,” it says. “I’m not a doctor yet.”

“Might as well get used to it,” says another student. This one has a scalpel in each hand. Jon traces the lines of its arms to its shoulders with his eyes, then back down to its fingertips, the shine of the twin scalpels in the harsh light. 

Doe, not yet a doctor, smiles at the double wielding student, too many teeth in its mouth, and giggles. “True. Doctor Smith.”

“Opening cut, then?” 

It feels like they’re doing an autopsy, sort of, he guesses. The neat, clean line across his chest, right under his clavicle. It starts bleeding immediately, but Doe, despite it still being just a student, asks for _suction, clamps_ as if it knows what that means. It doesn’t, really, and neither do the rest of them. One shoves a little tube at him. It sucks the overflowing blood out for them to see better. The clamps never come. 

And God, it _hurts_. It’s a paper cut, first, and then the scalpel keeps sinking, splitting muscle and sinew and whatever else there is (not eyes –) and digging, nerves and veins severing. The transition isn’t quick, or gradual, or slow. It’s a paper cut, and then it’s not. It’s a searing, white-hot pain. It’s a dull, hollow, distant pain. Jon tries to breathe and the students hold his ribs down to keep his lungs from expanding, and Jon wheezes uselessly. 

It’s not the pain that he fears. The pain is familiar. The pain he can deal with. It’s the things he doesn’t know. 

He wonders if he’s going to pass out. He wonders if, before this kills him, he will pass out. He wonders if he will know what death feels like, properly, this time. Before being resurrected forcibly. If he’ll know what hell is like, if this isn’t it. If hell is real. 

(Not knowing turning into knowing is the point, though, isn’t it? The exhilarating thrill of filling emptiness with something solid and real and satisfying. The low-hum pleasure of consumption. Something to fill the aching cavities in his body with. His blood thrums. His veins vibrate. His heart keeps skipping beats, his body struggling to replace the blood running out of his veins, his heart pumping it out through his shredded veins. The gaping maw inside of him opens into a yawn, saliva dripping down the sharp teeth.)

For a time it’s just a dozen excited, barely restrained hands touching him, trailing fingers over his chest, poking inside right after the scalpel. They’re silent. Like they’re watching, looking, taking it all in wordlessly, almost in a trance. Like they’re too distracted by the sheer amount of knowledge to gain to actually gain it. 

(Jon can relate to that.)

Fingers dip inside of him, into the long cut running vertically over the length of his sternum, to the third knuckle, pull the flesh apart. 

“Ribs,” says one, pride in its voice, and then there’s the sound of the others writing it down, like the name of the bones is all they need, like they have to make sure to remember what they’d seen. 

Jon can’t see them. The ribs, that is – he can see where fingers disappear into his body. He can see where blood gushes out around the intrusions. The ribs, themselves, remain a mystery. Something he can imagine. Something he knows the shape of, the function, what they feel like. He can place them inside of himself fine. He just can’t _see_.

They lose interest in the structure of a regular surgery rapidly. Doe tries to get them to focus again, to watch it trail the blade up and down his sternum aimlessly, like it doesn’t really know what it should be doing, the tip of the blade just scraping over the bone, but the hands disperse and then there’s students all around him, each with their own scalpel. Other tools, too, he thinks, even if he doesn’t know what they are, exactly. He will, soon enough, he thinks. It makes a thrill go through him, silent, half discomfort, half excitement. 

Jon tries to look and to not look at the same time as the blades cut open the soft skin of his belly, the thin layer of fat, through the muscle. His heart pounds in his chest, and when the blood threatens to pool in the dip of his stomach where the skin is still intact there’s a pair of hands with a machine to suck up the blood, the thin plastic tube filling and dumping it all into a bucket with wet sounds. There are hands inside of him again, pushing and pulling and jostling what must be his organs. 

He can’t actually feel it. No nerves there. He wishes he could. He wishes he could _see_. He closes his eyes and imagines it. The pulsing, moving masses. Blood pumping into them through arteries. Capillaries and arteries and veins, the cavities in which they’re nestled rapidly filling with blood and fluids. All those organs touched and prodded and lifted up gently for the students to study. 

That man, he thinks, the one they took the liver from. Or was it kidneys? He could know. He wonders if they’re going to do that to him. He wonders if they took his kidneys, or liver, or lungs, if they would just grow back. If he still needs them. His heart pumps blood through his body like he needs it. His lungs fill and deflate like he needs oxygen. He wishes he could see the squirm of his intestines, the movement of his lungs –

(Intestines keep moving like a living thing if you pull them out of a body, he knows. Like a snake. Like a man begging for his life, crawling away fast as he can. Gun pointed to his head. Digging a grave with shaking arms. Blood seeping out of a neck wound as his pulse hammers in his throat, unable to understand that by trying to keep supplying his brain with oxygen it’s simply making him bleed out right there, in that shallow grave. Jon shakes his head. Tears try to leak out of his eyes but he refuses to let them.)

“Should’ve shaved him first,” one of them mumbles. Jon looks. The source of the voice puts nitrile gloves on its already bloody hands, and without waiting for confirmation or denial for its assessment cuts a long, confident line down the length of his thigh. Jon hisses.

“I know,” the student says in a totally neutral tone. “Hurts, all that.”

For a second he’d thought it was going to cut into the muscle, to get a good look at the bones, he supposes, the anatomy of them, like they’d done with his ribcage, but the cuts are shallow, just deep enough to get through the layer of skin, just to see the muscle underneath. It keeps cutting until it almost reaches his knee, lifts up the scalpel, cuts another line. This time it’s horizontal. 

A square, he realizes. It’s taking away the skin. A little window into his body. 

Like he’d thought, when the cuts all connect, the student peels his skin out of the way carefully, slowly (and how he wishes it’d be quick – that it’d make it fast, like ripping a bandaid, but the Eye says look, _feel_ , isn’t the white-hot pain good, isn’t it good to _feel_ –). 

He’s not supposed to feel air against the muscles of his thigh. He’s not supposed to feel air against any of them. 

(Feel it, the Eye whispers, and Jon does.)

“Can you flex this muscle?” it asks, curious. Jon almost thinks it's going to put its hand on his thigh, right on the bare, exposed muscle, but it doesn’t. The hands hover over his thigh for a bit, but ultimately they settle at its sides. 

“I can try,” he exhales, and does just that. It works, he thinks. It hurts, but it works. The nerves try to fire. They succeed, for the most part. 

“Oh,” the student sighs. “It’s beautiful.”

Jon looks as well, but all he can see is the glistening layer of blood. Some other fluid, he thinks. The Eye within him is quiet. Sated, momentarily, he thinks. The muscle is right there. The students all still, eyes fixed on the unnatural flex of his muscle, nothing to protect it, and for a moment there is nothing but silence. 

And the sound of blood, Jon realizes. 

He’s not sure anyone else can hear it. Just him. Just him listening to the waterfall rush of blood as it seeps through, pools within the confines of the edges of skin. 

The students disperse again. The scalpels settle on his skin, all over his body. Most of the cuts are shallow, now, each interested in seeing just the muscles, the way they twitch and shiver, like the skin of a horse trying to encourage a fly that’s landed on it to fly away again. 

Jon watches the skin fuse back together on his thigh as they do, like plastic melting. The nerves connect painfully, make his leg twitch. The edges where skin meets skin remain red and raised. Clear fluid seeps out. 

One of the students by his chest puts its hand over his ribs to get leverage and then carefully, slowly wedges the scalpel into his side until it can cut a hole into the muscle. 

“Ah,” Jon gasps. 

“Hurts?” the student asks. Its voice is much too excited for Jon’s liking.

“Yes,” he says. The scalpel sinks in deeper. Hot knife. Butter. It might actually puncture his lung, he thinks deliriously, suddenly lightheaded from the pain. He can’t decide if he wants it to. 

The blade withdraws without piercing his lung and then the gloved fingers of its other hand are on the edges of the wound, pulling it open gently. Blood flows out in an irregular stream to the rhythm of his heart. 

Shouldn’t he be on the edge of consciousness? He listens to his own heart. Maybe the rate of blood loss has slowed. Is it because his veins are healing? Connecting and fixing themselves? Is his body simply making more blood? Does he need blood? 

The student with its fingers in his side takes off its lab coat. Guess it makes sense it wouldn’t be wearing anything else underneath it, he thinks wearily. None of them are wearing scrubs, either. He’d seen them all gather at the sinks, diligently washing and disinfecting their hands beforehand, but only some of them are wearing gloves. He’s almost certain most of them are wearing latex gloves, too. 

Makes sense, in a way. He is more of an experiment than a patient, after all. 

So: the lab coat comes off. The fingers retreat from the open wound in his side. The other students turn to look. 

He hadn’t thought they’d have genitals. It makes – it makes and doesn’t make sense at the same time. They have all the right body parts. Makes sense they’d have _all_ the right body parts. Guess he’d just never really thought they’d need them, like they’d need to have a nose or fingers or eyes or skin covering the general shape of them. Covered by clothes as they’d be.

The student approaches, hand wrapped around its – and it’s a penis, isn’t it? It’s a _dick._ No way around it, really. It seems to work like one, too – when it pumps its hand around it slowly, unhurriedly, it swells and hardens with blood like any other. He’s not really sure what’s going to happen with that. He hadn’t thought they’d be capable of sexual arousal, or pleasure, or – anything of the sort. It’s hard to not read this to be that way, though. 

The head of it bumps against Jon’s side, right next to the wound. 

“Oh,” Jon says, alarm in his voice, “that’s not – that’s, you’re not supposed to put that in there –”

“Is there a difference?” the student Doe had called Smith asks. “People put their genitals in each other’s holes all the time.”

Maybe it really doesn’t understand why there’d be one. A hole is a hole is a hole. 

(A monster is a monster is a monster.)

“Yes,” Jon insists. “There’s a difference.”

The cock nudges its way against the hole in Jon’s side, right under his ribs. Jon twitches, but with the restraints there’s not really anywhere for him to go. The student pulls out, discontented, and then there’s a scalpel inside of him again, poking in further, cutting into the muscle, whatever it finds to make more room. 

His lung does puncture, then. 

It’s the single most painful thing he’s ever experienced, he thinks. He can’t hear the air rush out of the deflating balloon of an organ but he can imagine it well enough. The ribs above it move and shift and crack, and Jon doesn’t know if that’s normal, too distracted by the feeling of his breath rushing out of his body, the futile reflex of breathing doing nothing but making him wheeze and gasp in pain. 

“Stay still,” Doe instructs him. Curious how he’s come to recognize it by its voice. Jon trembles and gasps and tries to breathe, even with blood filling one of his lungs, as the cock of the student pushes in through the resistance, spreads the hole open around itself. 

“Mm,” the student with its cockhead inside of Jon’s body hums. “Tell us.”

Jon squeezes his eyes shut. It hurts. It’s not terribly large, as far as objectivity goes, but inside of his body, where only muscle and organs should be, where it’s lodged comfortably (for the student –) against his collapsing lung it might as well be two feet long. Is it going to try to penetrate his lung? Is it going to plug up the hole there with the horrible weight of it? See if he can fix it that way? Keep it from closing on its own. Keep him dependent on its continuing benevolence. There’s nothing stopping it from doing that. Or waiting for him to heal and cutting him open again, endlessly, repeatedly, until he begs for death. 

The Eye would like it. Jon closes his eyes. Are there eyes inside of him, looking out of the hole extending from his side and into his tender, pink lung? 

“Starting to heal,” a student murmurs before Jon can try to tell the one with its cock inside of him to pull out. He wonders, vaguely, why they’d even want to do this. What this has to do with their experimentation. Hardly anything connects this to their ideas of surgery, really. Or research. 

A hand reaches over to trace its fingers across the closing wound, where it tries to heal but can’t with the cock in the way. The fingers are replaced with the light pressure of a scalpel blade.

“Should I open him back up?” 

The student with its cock inside of Jon snaps its hips forward, then back again, the head knocking the air out of the lung it connects with, the hole in it still healing. “It can’t close,” it says. “Not around something.”

Jon tries to scream but the only sound that’ll come out of his mouth is a gargled moan. 

“Does your god like this?” asks one of the students that aren’t touching him, the pen in its hand scribbling little letters into the notebook it’s holding. 

Jon closes his eyes, tight, painful. He can still see it all. The gush of blood. The snap of hips against his skin. The faces of the students, bright and eager and happy, too many teeth in their too wide mouths. 

The fear and pain is – it’s not the same as hearing about it from someone. It’s not the same as hearing about it after the fact. It’s not the same. The way it makes his mouth water isn’t the same. 

It’s better. It’s so much better. 

“Yes,” he gasps. “Yes, it’s good.”

The student writes it down. The sound of pen on paper feels good, somehow. The documentation of it all. It feels right and good and pure and correct and so, so satisfying. 

The slide of the scalpel blade into his other side is almost pleasurable with the symmetry of it. There’s a lovely second where he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, and then the blessed _gaining_ of knowledge when two fingers reach in, in, force their way through the resistance of muscle. 

“Do you think we’ll find eyes in here?” the student with its fingers in him asks. The one with its cock inside of Jon’s futilely closing wound smiles. Jon can’t see it, but he _Knows_. 

“Maybe,” it says. 

Jon doesn’t know if they will. It makes it worse. It makes it better. 

Elias, if it were him, could look through the eyes of these little monsters. Get a good bird’s eye view at himself. The puddles of blood gathering in any indent of his body, any smooth plane. The open wounds. The pulse of his blood out of severed veins. The outlines of organs moving and working. Things he shouldn’t see. Things he shouldn’t be able to see. 

Jon tries to, as well. It doesn’t work. He looks up at the ceiling. There’s no mirror up there. He wishes there was. 

The students look through the hole in his side. Like they don’t already know what’s in there. As if they hadn’t done this with the other side. He supposes they didn’t get to look enough before the hole got filled. That there were things they wanted to see and poke at and document. 

He hopes they don’t puncture this lung. He hopes they do. 

The student with a cock inside of him comes with no warning, just the irregular snap of its hips against him, the twitch of its cock. Jon jerks, surprised, and the horror of feeling the hot fluid coat his insides is _fresh_ in a way he doesn’t know how to _feel_ , let alone describe. Disgust and fear and the horrible feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen when his body heals itself around it, around what it’d left inside of him tangle together until there’s no way for him to separate them. It’s white-hot the way the first few incisions had been. It’s sharp and good and right. If he could he would drink it with a straw. Like a tall glass of ice water. Lemon squeezed in. 

There are hands on his inner thighs, then. One of them touches over the seam of the square of skin that’s still attaching itself back to the rest of him, tender and raw, and Jon hisses. The student doesn’t pause, fingers trailing upwards until they hit the folds of Jon’s cunt. 

He’s wet, he realizes. He could pretend it’s blood – and god, isn’t he covered in blood, all over – but he _knows_ that’s not all it is. 

He’s being cut open and he’s _wet_.

A gloved finger grabs his cock with two hands and tugs on it. It’s a little too hard. Jon hisses in shock and pain, and the hand retreats only to push two fingers into his hole with a slick sound. 

“A hole is a hole,” it mumbles, as if echoing Jon’s thoughts from earlier, when he’d wondered about it. The fingers twist and stretch him open, pulling apart, and Jon squeaks in surprise when they press up. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” Jon replies. The fingers wiggle in deeper, deeper, til they’re in to the last knuckle, and when there is nowhere else for them to go the student pushes in another two fingers. It struggles, predictably, and the grunt it lets out is one of frustration. 

“Ah,” Jon gasps in alarm, muscles fluttering weakly around the intrusion, “um, if you keep doing that it’s _going_ to hurt –”

“What’s the difference?” it asks. The tip of its thumb hooks itself inside as well. “All of this has hurt.”

The thumb doesn’t go in easily. The drying blood on its fingers isn’t helping the glide, and wet as he might be he’s not _ready_ for its fist. 

“Fuck –”

“There’s bone,” the student mumbles, its hand struggling to slide any deeper, Jon’s muscles trembling around it. It wiggles its hand up, then down again, displeased with the presence of the bones of his hips. 

“Yes,” another says, like it’s obvious. “Did you not remember?”

The hand slides in just an inch, two, laboriously. Jon wonders about tearing. He wonders if they’ll just cut him open to make room. He wonders if they’ll care if he tears. If they’ll keep shoving things in until there’s no more tissue for them to take away to make further room. He wonders if it’ll hurt, healing. 

The fear within him spikes again, where it’d settled down, splashes around within him like water in a glass. The hand inside of him is too large for him to take. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything at all.

“There,” the student says, and just as he does its hand slides in to the wrist, the tips of its fingers bumping against Jon’s cervix painfully. He gasps with the stretch, the relief of his cunt closing around the slender wrist instead of the widest part of the hand. Everything really is relative, he thinks wearily. 

The students gasp in excitement. 

“I want to see,” one of them says. “Can we cut him open?” it asks. A hand settles on Jon’s lower stomach, right above his pubic mound. 

There’s a sea of approving murmurs. One hand trails down his belly, between his legs, finds his cock. They can’t know how to make it feel good, they just _can’t_ , but it touches him as if it's trying anyway, like it knows that’s how it should work but doesn’t quite know why or how. 

It takes him a few seconds to understand that they’re _actually_ going to do it, the blade of the scalpel settling right over where the fist of the student is stretching him open, the drag of it, in and out, making his muscles stretch forcibly, pain and pleasure blending into sparks of feeling, tears burning in his eyes. 

It’s not the pain that scares him. It’s that from this angle he’ll be able to see. 

The blade sinks in. Jon’s eyes close, and then open again. Watch, says the voice in his head. No, no, no, he says back. You want to know, it says. Jon doesn’t say anything back. 

The wound is long and even, and then there are hands holding the edges apart, pulling the skin away to look inside. 

What are they seeing? Are there –

Eye avatars, he thinks, with eyes inside of them. Nothing but eyes. Just eyes and the impressions of what used to be organs. Muscle and sinew with little eyes mapping out the surfaces of them. Bones turning semi-solid with the eyeballs taking up more and more space from them. Eyes, all seeing, seeing nothing, kept prisoners within the secret rooms of the cavities of his body. 

Bones. And muscle. And the pulsing organs. He’d seen them earlier. They’d written down _ribs_.

Nothing about eyes. Nothing about eyes. 

But then again, maybe they’d expected them to be there. Maybe their presence would’ve been less shocking than the presence of his ribs. His bones. There being organs in his hollow, barely human body at all. Atrophied from months of disuse. Nothing pumping through him. No blood. Nothing. 

The student slides its hand further in, back out, the shape of its fist, the knuckles spreading him open. There’s not much more he can do but gasp and shudder, and look, and look   
–

The hands retreat, just for a second, and Jon catches a glimpse of the shape of the fist, visible through the hole in his belly, where they’d cut right through the muscle, where they’re holding him open to see. 

“Interesting,” one of them says. It sounds earnest. Excited. One finger pokes in. Jon watches it touch the knuckles of the hand inside of him. 

“Could we fit two?” it wonders. 

“Maybe,” the one with the hand inside of him says. It sounds sceptical as much as it sounds disinterested. It doesn’t seem that they care that much, whether he can take a fist or two fists or five. If they cut enough of him away they can fit all the fists they want. 

Jon’s muscles squeeze around the fist. Or try, rather. In some parts there’s nothing for him to squeeze. Blood trickles out through his cunt around the fist, squeezing through where he’s filled to the brim. 

“It’ll heal,” he mutters to himself, panic settling in again, “it’ll heal, it’ll heal.”

(What if it doesn’t? Asks the voice. You’ll get to look forever. Jon looks down at the gentle caress of what are now two fingers over the blood-slick fist inside of his cunt. I don’t want to look forever, he thinks. He wishes it was because it’s too horrifying to take. Too disturbing. Too much for him to deal with. He knows it’s because he’d get used to it too fast. That eventually, sooner rather than later, he’d look at the gaping holes of his body and it’d make him feel nothing.)

“Might as well just move on,” another student says, voice like bells. “There’s still a lot to look at.”

The fingers withdraw from the open hole, and then the fist slides out as well, rough and impatient. 

Jon realizes he never did end up seeing any eyes. Anything proving or disproving their existence. Even cut open something always keeps him from seeing inside. Always something in the way. The thought of standing in front of a mirror, scalpel in hand, neat lines down the lines of his body cutting through muscle as clean as possible puts itself into his head like a permanent tooth replacing a milk tooth. Could he see, then? Would it feel as good? Could he make eye contact with whatever might be inside of him, like greeting something born of nothing? Phoenix, all that. Endless loop of suffocating eye contact with himself. Who would look away first? Could either of them look away? 

Would it be a separate thing, whatever it would be? Would it just be him? Like calling your hand an entity in on itself. Is he his body, or does he just have a body? Does his body exist as its own thing he just puppets around? Is it cruel, to keep it, to do whatever he wants? How would he go about setting it free? Is it a prison? Is he keeping it as a prisoner? 

There’s hands all over him. Hands all inside of him. All these surfaces that shouldn’t be touched. What surfaces has he touched? So many of them he should’ve left alone. He feels as the hands sink deep, deep, deeper into him, scalpels and fingers. He wonders about bone saws. He saw some earlier. 

(He thinks about Jane, then. Did it feel that way to her, too? When the worms burrowed their way into her. When the surfaces of her body suddenly became too many? Adding holes. Adding surface area. There is more of him, now, like there was more of her, at the end. In different ways. A monster is a monster is a monster.)

It blurs. Everything does. The hands. The pain. He wonders what the breaking point was. His head, soupy, full of fear, feels heavy. His neck feels weak and small and skinny. Somewhere within him the maw tries to close itself, full, on the brink of overflowing. He’s never been so full, so satisfied. He’s never been so happy. He’s never been in such pain. 

The feeling starts in his throat and travels down, down, before shooting back up from between his hips, to his head. It becomes a physical motion somewhere around his temples, body thrashing, and the students chide him in unison, tongues and lips shaping themselves around the syllables of “stay still” with fruitless futility. 

He doesn’t _come_. But it’s similar. It’s almost the same.

The students retreat, almost all in complete silence, a few of them whispering to each other. It must have unnerved them, he thinks, body both heavy and light. He’s so broken. He’s so whole. 

The wounds heal. He watches skin grow over the open hole in his lower belly from scratch, where they’d taken the strip of skin and muscle and fat and thrown it away. He’s glad it didn’t crawl out and back to him from the blood-filled bucket, plaster itself over the gaping wound. It feels right. Replacing some parts of himself. Like he should be coming out of this partially new. Some things made completely from scratch. 

Jon closes his eyes. “All done?” he asks softly.

“Yes,” says one of the students. He’s too full to try to figure out which one.

“Good,” he replies. Blood trickles out from his mouth, down his cheek, all the way to his jaw. It stops there. He wonders about the rate of it drying. The scientific calculations of it. 

There’s a moment of unsure silence, and then in a tone that’s equally unsure, “thank you for showing us the insides.”

It’s all of them. He knows this. The knowledge makes him want to curl into a little ball. Too much. He knows too much. It’s so hard not to know.

Thank you for showing us the insides. Jon thinks, thank you for showing me the insides. Even if they didn’t. Even if he didn’t see. Maybe it’s the point. Maybe he saw enough. Maybe they allowed him to straddle the line of knowing and not knowing. To keep him wanting more. Maybe this is a well he can empty out forever without a fear of it running dry.

There’s a clatter as scalpels fall onto the floor, into buckets, onto the metal surfaces around the room. The air feels cold, and then colder. 

The dead bodies around him hum little songs. Or they hummed little songs, before they were corpses. The wet sounds of his flesh pulling itself together hums a little song of its own. Jon listens, and listens, and sings along.


End file.
